10 Tips to Writing Better Quiz Questions

Quizzes are a valuable part of an e-Learning course. They provide scores to evaluate your learners during or after their online training is over. But you should also recognize how quizzes are valuable for you—the e-Learning developer. Quizzes are a built-in way to provide course feedback. They show you if your learners are accomplishing the learning objectives in your course, so you can adjust the material for next time. However, to ensure you receive the most accurate feedback, you need to make sure you’re writing effective quiz questions.

Use these 10 tips to help you write better quiz questions in your e-Learning course:

For Drag and Drop or Matching questions, don’t include too many options in the answer bank. This could get overwhelming for learners. Instead, break a long list of answers into two (or more) separate sections.

Don’t rely on True/False questions. They don’t test your learner’s knowledge as well as other question types because your learner has a 50/50 chance of answering—or guessing—it right.

If you do use True/False questions, avoid using absolute words like “only,” “never” and “always.”

Try to avoid using “All of the above” or “None of the above” in your Multiple Choice questions. These can often seem like trick questions or confuse your learners.

Be consistent with answer lengths. Since our brains look for patterns and visual cues, this may make the correct answer too obvious.

Make sure your choices for a Multiple Choice question are grammatically parallel. One differently-phrased choice can mislead your learners.

Use serious distractors—the incorrect choices—for Multiple Choice questions. Distractors aren’t the time to make a joke.